When World War II broke out, many of Hollywood’s top stars — among them Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor and James Stewart — promptly enlisted. No branch of the armed forces would take Errol Flynn, who suffered from a variety of physical ailments, including recurring bouts of malaria. So it’s perhaps not surprising that Flynn made more war-themed movies during the war than any other major star (John Wayne made four during the duration, not including the homefront drama “Pittsburgh”).

Five of them are collected in the oddly-titled “Errol Flynn Adventures,” the fourth Flynn box set released by Warner Home Video and the first under its TCM Spotlight label. Four of the five are directed by the Raoul Walsh, a veteran of the silent era who became Flynn’s default director after the star had a falling out with his frequent collaborator Michael Curtiz on “Dive Bomber” (1941), released before the U.S. entry into the war and included in a previous Flynn set.

Walsh’s “Desperate Journey (1942), in production concurrently with Curtiz’s “Casablanca” not long after Pearl Harbor, is a far more elaborate and lavish production, with Oscar-nominated special effects that are still impressive. Flynn, playing an Australian (his true nationality) leads an RAF bomber crew that’s been shot down in a raid deep in Germany. For some reason, the crew includes an American (Ronald Reagan, billed over the title with Flynn in the wake of “King’s Row”), a Canadian (Arthur Kennedy), a Scottish veteran (Flynn’s frequent comic relief Alan Hale) and the son of a famous British World War I flying ace played by Ronald Sinclair, a second-string Freddie Bartholomew at MGM in the late ’30s.

As the title hints, this is ostensibly about their grueling journey back to safety in England while being pursued by a buffonish German major (Raymond Massey). But it’s really pure wish-fulfilment fantasy action about this merry band of inglorious bastards blowing up stuff — including a chemical factory — and killing lots and lots of Germans. This was the last film Reagan made before he was drafted — to make training and propaganda films like the Oscar-nominated “The Rear Gunner” (with Burgess Meredith) which is included in the set. The future president has one particularly funny scene — swiped from “All Through the Night,” released a few months earlier — where he doubletalks Massey during an interrogation.

Lewis Milestone’s “Edge of Darkness” (1943), the only film not directed by Walsh in the set, is a far more sober affair. Milestone, who helmed the similar, Russia-set “The North Star,” the following year (also photographed by the great James Wong Howe) opens with a striking sequence where Germans find the streets of a Norwegian fishing village piled high with dead bodies.

In flashbacks, Flynn is quite good in one of his best roles as the village’s resistance leader, who has to cope not only with Nazis but quislings (Charles Dingle, John Beal) and reluctant warriors (Walter Huston) — at least until the occupiers humiliate the beloved schoolmaster (Morris Carnovsky in a chilling sequence) and rape (off-screen) Flynn’s girlfiend, played by Ann Sheridan. The top-drawer cast includes Judith Anderson and Ruth Gordon, who had to be legally restrained by Warners from leaving for a Broadway production of “The Three Sisters” with Katherine Cornell when fog at the Monterey location — doubling for Norway — delayed filming.

Other off-screen drama during the film’s lengthy shoot included Flynn’s reported affair with co-star Sheridan, whose husband George Brent divorced her, supposedly after discovering them in the act. More seriously, Flynn was charged with statutory rape while the film was in production — Warners rushed his sole non-war film, Walsh’s “Gentlemen Jim” into theaters, where it was booed in some cases. Flynn was eventually acquitted.

Flynn collapsed with tuberculosis during the making of Walsh’s “Northern Pursuit” (1943) and indeed, he looks exhausted in his few close-ups. The movie starts out as a Hollywood knock-off of Michael Powell’s “The 39th Powell,” with German officer Helmet Dantine (also the main villain in “Edge of Darkness”) dropped in Canada’s Northern Territories by submarine and setting out on a sabotage mission.

It soon turns into a variation on “Bullets or Ballots,” with German-Canadian mountie Flynn pretending to be a Nazi sympathizer so he can be thrown off the force and join Dantine and a band that includes American Gene Lockhart (who actually was Canadian in real-life). Things get silly as Flynn’s fiancee (Julie Bishop. who looks great in furs) somehow tracks them down, but Walsh and the screenwriters have plenty of tricks to keep your interest. This one was pretty much cast on the lot, with John Ridgely and Monte Blue, who between them appeared in almost every film Warners made in the ’40s, getting larger roles than usual.

By 1943, Flynn’s on-screen heroics were being mocked by the actor himself in a musical number in “Thank Your Lucky Stars,” included in a WHV previous set, “The Homefront Collection.” His next film, which is credited to Flynn’s personal production company, is an attempt to go in another direction. In the little seen “Uncertain Glory” (1944) Flynn is a French thief condemned to the guillotine for murder. He escapes during a bombing and is recaptured by a middle-aged police detective — Paul Lukas, the German-born actor who had won the Best Actor Oscar the year before for Warners’ “Watch on the Rhine.”

The Nazis are threatening to execute 100 hostages unless a saboteur who blew up a bridge surrenders, and Flynn, figuring he has nothing to lose, offers to take blame for the crime. Lukas is deeply skeptical of Flynn’s motives, but can’t quite say no. With relatively little action, “Uncertain Glory” is an acting showcase for Flynn as the deeply conflicted, Sydney Carton-ish anti-hero. Warners hedged its bets by giving Flynn a romantic subplot involving one of the hostages’ sisters, played by Jean Sullivan, a charming newcomer whose career didn’t go very far. With Lucille Watson (another holdover from “Watch on the Rhine”) Sheldon Leonard and Faye Emerson.

Easily the best film in the set — one of the best World War II movies of them all — is Walsh’s “Objective Burma!” (1945). Flynn got perhaps the strongest notices of his career for his restrained turn as an architect from Maine who leads a squadron of paratroopers behind Japanese lines to bomb a radar installation in preparation for the allied invasion of Burma. This documentary-style action drama was issued on DVD as a standalone in 2003, but this gorgeous new transfer shows off James Wong Howe’s amazing cinematography on Southern California locations, seamlessly integrated with Signal Corps footage shot in Burma by editor George Amy.

The mission goes off without a hitch, but an evacuation plan falls apart and Flynn’s squad has to trek hundreds of miles on foot through very hostile territory — Walsh makes this very gripping through a 140-minute running time that eschews the comic-book heroics of his previous films with Flynn (who seems to have aged about a decade since “Desperate Journey,” made just three years earlier) as the flyers suffer heavy casualties.

Character actor Henry Hull (“The Werewolf of London”) is a standout as an Ernie Pyle-style middle-aged war correspondent who struggles to keep up on the forced march — and voices American’s then-current attitudes toward the Japanese in racial epithets that are offensive today. The cast includes a number of familiar faces who went on to long careers on TV — Warner Anderson, James Brown and the Beaver’s dad, Hugh Beaumont.

“Objective Burma!” was banned in the U.K. in 1952 for minimizing the British involvement in the Burma invasion. Walsh more or less remade it as “Distant Drums,” a Gary Cooper adventure set during the Seminole War. Producer Jerry Wald, who wrote the original story for the 1945 film (the credited screenwriters include future blacklistees Alvah Bessie and Lester Cole) said it was loosely inspired by “Northwest Passage.” Portions of Franz Waxman’s excellent score — there are long stretches without music — turned up in many other films including Sam Fuller’s “Merrill’s Maurauders” (1962), based on real-life exploits of the Burma invaders who inspired Walsh’s film.

This classic includes an excellent new commentary track by film historians Rudy Behlmer, Jon Burlingame and Frank Thompson. Warners’ most ambitious Golden Age set in a year and a half has a full complement of “Warner Night at the Movies” shorts compilations (with newsreels, Looney Tunes and wartime live-action shorts) on each disc. Trailers include the long-unavailable “The Constant Nymph” (1943). Does that mean this Joan Fontaine/Charles Boyer romance is finally leaving legal limbo? Hope so.

I will always associate Kim Novak with the 1950s more than any other actress — probably because I saw “The Man With the Golden Arm,” “Picnic” and “Vertigo” during their original theatrical runs, before my eighth birthday. Today Sony releases “The Kim Novak Collection,” which collects the three most famous films she made at her home studio, Columbia, plus a couple of undeservedly forgotten efforts, all released during that decade.

“Picnic” (1955) was Novak’s fourth movie as a star — after “Pushover” (included in the recent “Columbia Film Noir Classics Vol. 2”), “Five Against the House” (“Columbia Film Noir Classics Vol. 1) and her star-billed cameo in the Jack Lemmon-Judy Holliday vehicle “Phfftt.” This new remastering shows off the gorgeous location filming in Kansas by James Wong Howe.

Novak is luminous and touching as a beauty queen who falls for a handsome older drifter (William Holden) at the titular Labor Day event, much to the chagrin of her well-heeled boyfriend (Cliff Robertson, who seems too young to have gone to college with Holden). She more than holds her own despite some strong competition from Rosalind Russell, who was Oscar nominated for her scene-stealing role as an aging spinster trying to drag her newly-acquired boyfriend (Arthur O’Connell) to the altar. Betty Field, Susan Strasberg and Verna Felton co-star in one of the better directorial efforts by Joshua Logan (“South Pacific”), a huge hit at the time.

The remastered “Pal Joey” (1957) has Novak third-billed to Rita Hayworth, returning to the Columbia lot after a four-year absence, and Frank Sinatra, her co-star in “The Man With the Golden Arm,” which she made on loanout to Otto Preminger. This is a very cleaned-up version of the Broadway play by John O’Hara, retaining most of the Rogers and Hart songs and interpolating others. Sinatra plays the title role, a toned-down heel.

Novak is his chorus girl “mouse” (Sinatra explains Joey’s “hip” lingo in the hilarious trailer included) and Hayworth is the socialite backer who Joey exposes as a former stripper. Hayworth’s “Zip” number is a highlight, though she, like Novak (who “sings” “My Funny Valentine”) had her numbers dubbed. Sinatra, of course, does his own vocals, but director George Sidney annoyingly tends to interrupt the numbers, which are heard in full only on the original cast album (which has slightly different arrangements). Quite enjoyable anyway for its star power and location shooting in San Francisco.

Richard Quine’s “Bell Book and Candle” (1958) is the first of two back-to-back films Novak made with James Stewart — Columbia agreed to loan Novak to Paramount for “Vertigo” in return for Stewart, after Rex Harrison, who had played in John Van Druten’s original play on Broadway, reportedly declined to co-star with Novak. Photographed again by the great Howe, Novak is at her loveliest and most enigmatic as Gillian, a Greenwich Village art dealer who’s a witch.

She has an extraordinary chemistry with Stewart’s book publishing, and the superb supporting cast includes Jack Lemmon, Ernie Kovacs, Elsa Lanchester and Hermoine Gingold. This comedy, which loosely inspired the TV series “Bewitched,” is one of my favorites in a gorgeous new transfer, not to be missed.

“Jeanne Eagels” (1957) is a beyond-weird but still quite watchable biography of the great stage actress, who drank and drugged herself to death at 29, the first posthumous Oscar nominee for the early-talkie version of “The Letter.” That’s not in this movie, which depicts her shooting one movie in Hollywood (directed by Frank Borzage, who never actually worked with her, playing herself) as a silent — and it miraculously arriving in theaters after her death as a musical called “Forever Young,” with Kim lip-synching a Jerome Kern song composed years after Eagles’ death.

Novak, whose minimalist acting style looks better and better as the decades go by, tries hard to play the flamoyant, hard-living Eagles and occasionally succeeds. Jeff Chandler is charming as Novak’s main love interest, a macho carnival owner who initially employs Eagles as a cooch dancer (something she never did), and after Eagles is banned from the stage (which really happened), as a Coney Island burlesque queen (which didn’t). Though the script is questionable and Sidney’s direction is erratic, it holds your interest — particularly when Jeanne steals an adaptation of “Rain” from a washed-up actress (Virginia Grey).

Delbert Mann’s “Middle of the Night” (1959), filmed on location in Manhattan and like “Eagles” making its DVD debut, is the real discovery of the set. Frederic March gives one of the very best performances of his career as a middle-aged garment factory owner, a widower who falls in love with a divorced secretary (Novak) who’s younger than his daughter. They both face considerable opposition from their families, but that may be the least of their problems — Novak’s finely-limned performance suggests the character may never be happy with any man.

The top-drawer cast includes Albert Dekker (with probably the first reference to erectile dyfunction in an American film), ’30s comic actress Glenda Farrell (as Novak’s blowsy mom), Lee Grant and Martin Balsam. It’s a fascinating look at the old garment district and the city’s middle-class life at midcentury.

This set includes film historian Steven Rebello’s newly-recorded interviews with Novak, who offers vivid recollections of making the films and her collaborators. They add needed context to this iconic actress’ very underrated career.

Ray Enright’s “Angels Wash Their Faces” (1939), a pseudo-sequel to “Angels With Dirty Faces” that reunites the Dead End Kids with Ann Sheridan and also features Ronald Reagan, turned up today at the Warner Archive Collection. In addition to the previously announced “Yellowstone Kelly” and “Agatha,” the manufactured-on-demand service is offering the DVD debuts of John Brahm’s “The Locket” with Laraine Day, Brian Aherne and Robert Mitchum; George Sidney’s “Young Bess” starring Jean Simmons, Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr and Charles Laughton; as well as Edward Dmytrky and James Hilton’s “So Well Remembered” with John Mills, Martha Scott and Trevor Howard.